Why Travel Across Canada?

Having travelled across Canada three times, I found this absolutely hilarious. SO TRUE.

Kendo UI Official Launch Webinar

In case you missed it, yesterday, we launched Kendo UI. As part of the launch, Todd Anglin hosted a webinar where he highlighted this framework and its licensing model. Due to the popularity of this webinar, they were a few folks who couldn’t connect to the live event. Fortunately, we recorded the webinar and published it to YouTube.

I’d strongly recommend watching this video if you’re looking for a good lap-around Kendo UI.

YOW! Melbourne 2011 and that Crankshaft Presentation

Greetings from Melbourne! This week, I attended YOW! 2011, a conference for Australian developers featuring talks on web development, infrastructure and coding practices.

Opening remarks at YOW! 2011 in Melbourne

According to the YOW! conference organizers, approximately 500 people registered for this event. This wasn’t a surprise to me; Melbourne has a fantastic developer community and has always supported events such as these. Mitch Denny and I were witness to this when we co-founded the Melbourne .NET User Group back-in-the-day.

On day 1, I attended a number of excellent presentations. However, there was one presentation in-particular that was simply awesome. It was a presentation by Kasper Lund from Google talking about Crankshaft, the compilation infrastructure of V8 (Chrome’s JavaScript engine). FWIW, Kasper’s also a member of the Dart team.

Kasper Lund (Google) at YOW! 2011 in Melbourne

In his presentation, Kasper went into great detail about how Crankshaft optimizes JavaScript. It’s amazing to hear some of the things that Crankshaft does to tease out every possible drop of performance possible from JavaScript. Much of it involves runtime inspection of the code as it’s running and optimizing when it’s appropriate to do so. The big take-away for me was realizing that JIT compilers have a tough job; they have to walk a fine line between making JavaScript run super-fast without bogging down the environment.

After Kasper’s presentation, it felt like my brain had been through the spin cycle of a washing machine. This is a good thing. Many presentations today are way too shallow. I always prefer to “go deep” on something, struggle along the way, and then reformulate afterward.

Anyway, I found a video up on Vimeo of a talk Kasper gave about the V8 engine:

It’s worth a look in order to gain a better understanding how Google Chrome optimizes JavaScript.

Kendo UI v1.0 Released!

Earlier today, we took the wraps off Kendo UI, a framework for creating interactive web applications with modern web standards. My colleague, Todd Anglin wrote about today’s release in a blog post where he highlights what’s new in Kendo UI, the breakdown of products (Kendo UI Web, Kendo UI DataViz, and Kendo UI Mobile – currently, a preview), and the official licensing that underpins it. The good news? Existing customers will have access to Kendo UI Web in both the Telerik Premium and Ultimate Collections.

There’s a lot to like in the v1.0 release. In addition to some of the new UI widgets, we’ve added an integrated ability to modify themes. We call this the ThemeBuilder.

The ThemeBuilder is a tool that lets you modify the Kendo themes with ease, so that they match the look and feel of your site or app. Through a series of mouse clicks, you can quickly customize the look and feel of the Kendo UI widgets. Once you’re done, the ThemeBuilder will generate LESS or CSS text, which you can then integrate into your web application.

It’s pretty freaking sweet.

We’ve also introduced two new aspects of the Kendo UI framework: globalization and validation.

Globalization is the process of designing and developing an application that works in multiple cultures. The culture defines specific information for the number formats, week and month names, date and time formats, etc. Kendo UI exposes the culture(cultureName) method, which allows you to select the culture script corresponding to the “culture name”. This method then uses the culture name to select culture from the culture scripts that you have included and then sets the current culture. You can check out a live demo of this in-action by visiting the Kendo UI demos.

The Validator in Kendo UI provides an easy mechanism of client-side validation to web developers. Built around the HTML5 form validation attributes, the Validator supports a variety of built-in validation rules, but also provides a convenient way for setting custom rules handling. A live demo of the Validator can be seen on the Kendo UI demos page.

There’s certainly a lot more to cover. Fortunately, we’ll be hosting a webinar that provides you with everything you need to know about Kendo UI to help you get started. Simply register, attend, and you’ll hear everything you need to know about building awesome web experiences with Kendo UI.

In the meantime, make sure to follow Kendo UI on Twitter, Facebook or Google+. Also, don’t forget to check out our forums. They’re a great way to provide feedback to the team.

New Digs for Telerik APAC

Tomorrow is a big day for Telerik APAC; it’s moving day! That’s right, Telerik APAC will be leaving Neutral Bay for North Sydney. Here’s where you can find us:

Telerik Asia Pacific
Level 40, Unit 15, Northpoint Tower, 100 Miller Street
North Sydney, NSW, Australia
2060

If you’re in the area, you can’t miss us; we’re in the tallest building in North Sydney. Please drop in and say hello!